My good friend, Paul Mouser is a real-life Hercules. Being a personal trainer, himself a strongman competitor as well as the Strongman Corp West Virginia State Chairman, and retired pro wrestler are more than enough to qualify him for this status. Recently, when working on my painting "Hercules breaking the bonds of Prometheus", I consulted Paul on the mechanics of how one would go about breaking a chain. Paul's no stranger to these types of feats, as you can see in the video below.

​To the left, you can see examples of the timber ties before and after the bend in relation to his big size 12 shoe.

He informed me that the object would need to be kept close to the body. A small, but powerful range of movements would be used, instead of grand, exaggerated ones. You can see in this previous post, how I started with one pose and ended with a slightly different version.

So there you have it. A real-life Hercules helped in the process of this piece! Enjoy!